Knowledge is but a source of sorrow.

The rain did not cease.

The steadily intensifying drops struck the only gravel path in Eclie Village, splashing in all directions and producing a chorus of sharp, rhythmic splats. As a mist began to rise from the path, Wu Qingchen, who had been poaching rabbits near the hillside outside the village just moments ago, appeared at the bend. Grasping the hood over his head with both hands, he jogged breathlessly into the church.

“Los, is that you?” At the sound, a small figure who had been crouching by the altar immediately stood, turning to look toward the door.

“Good afternoon, Andre. I... I’m here.”

Drawing several deep breaths to steady his panting, Wu Qingchen walked toward the altar. Noticing that Andre already held a rag in his hand, Wu Qingchen frowned. “Andre, you’ve started already? Am I late?”

“No, I just began. I haven’t even finished wiping down the altar yet.”

This exchange made it clear that Wu Qingchen had not come to the church merely to escape the rain.

It was nearing dusk. As the priest had requested, Wu Qingchen had been arriving at the church at this hour for the last several days to help young Andre clean the altar, stone floors, and pews before joining in the evening prayers and sitting in on Andre’s afternoon lessons.

Over time, Wu Qingchen and young Andre had grown familiar with each other. Andre, the younger son of a minor family, had been sent to study theology under Pastor Playa at the age of twelve. Now, after a year and a half, he still found the lessons challenging—not only because he was young, but also because his talents were unremarkable. The priest’s teachings often left him perplexed and troubled.

On the other hand, as a second son unable to inherit, Andre had been strictly disciplined from a young age; once placed under the priest’s tutelage, years of strict upbringing and religious instruction had made him diligent, honest, humble, and remarkably obedient.

All in all, the Andre now standing beside Wu Qingchen would undoubtedly be the standard of “the perfect child” in the eyes of parents and relatives back on Earth.

The process of getting along with this “model child” was, of course, a pleasant one for Wu Qingchen.

From Andre’s perspective, his childhood at home had been a rigid series of rules, every step a careful balancing act. Life with the priest was just as monotonous, each day repeating itself. Now, with a companion his own age by his side, Andre had been in high spirits for days.

As for Wu Qingchen, with the mind of an adult in his twenties and armed with several hours of crash-course training from the best early childhood educators, he found it laughable to imagine failing to get along with a twelve-year-old—unless, perhaps, he’d been struck in the head by an elevator door, and not just any elevator, but one moving between floors.

At the church’s side door, Wu Qingchen picked up a broom—a rarity in this world—and began sweeping the stone floors.

While Wu Qingchen swept the floor, Andre cleaned the altar and pulpit. It did not take long for this phase of cleaning to draw to a close.

Satisfied with his work, Wu Qingchen returned the broom, while Andre put away his rag. Both then fetched dusters from behind the pulpit and moved to stand before the long rows of pews.

The final stage of cleaning was about to begin, and so would the review of Andre’s lessons.

Each time they reached this point, Wu Qingchen could not help but recall the first time he’d sat in on Andre’s afternoon tutoring.

Thanks to advance warnings from the Earth-based advisory team, Wu Qingchen had known that education in a medieval world would inevitably be backward. Still, after working twice as hard to finish his farm chores, he’d entered the church drenched in sweat, helped Andre clean, endured the near-hypnotic evening prayers, and finally waited for the priest to step down from the pulpit and begin the lessons. When that moment came, Wu Qingchen had to lower his head at once, hurriedly hiding his stunned expression.

After the lesson, as was customary, the priest quickly packed away his books and left the church for his quarters. Only young Andre remained, frowning over his revision, mistakes piling on top of mistakes—a hopeless mess. Wu Qingchen made his exit as swiftly as possible, barely suppressing his laughter.

The dusters swept gently, sending motes swirling from the pews.

At the same time, the clear, childish voice of Andre echoed through the church: “One, two, three, four, five...”

It was obvious: Wu Qingchen and Andre were counting aloud as they cleaned the benches, tallying each one completed.

The priest’s curriculum was divided into morning and afternoon sessions. The morning was reserved for theological texts. As for the afternoon...

Indeed, “one, two, three, four, five”—counting up to fifty—was the afternoon lesson for young Andre.

According to Andre’s recollection, counting to twenty had taken Pastor Playa a full half a month to teach. Without the help of fingers and toes, counting from twenty-one to fifty had already taken Andre at least two more months of study.

So, for a twelve-year-old who, on Earth, would be starting algebra and basic geometry in middle school, counting to fifty remained a daunting challenge—two and a half months and still not mastered.

Neither Andre nor Pastor Playa found anything unusual in this pace. After all, both teacher and pupil—and Playa’s own teachers before him—had taken just as long to learn the same basic arithmetic.

There was no systematic educational theory—each generation teaching and learning haphazardly; no large-scale cultural exchange—students and teachers alike shut away, their rare insights into teaching left to wither unshared; an illiteracy rate approaching ninety-nine point nine percent—almost everyone unable to read, most people relying on their ten fingers to compare amounts; serfs and peasant families never needing mathematics to manage their meager property, the self-sufficient nobles barely engaging in commerce.

All these factors converged, making such a learning pace and curriculum inevitable.

“Twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight...”

As he cleaned, Wu Qingchen counted aloud, earning countless glances of admiration and envy from Andre.

This made Wu Qingchen rather exasperated. With the mind of a grown man, he had no interest in feeling superior to a child.

Yet, because of that same mature mindset and the habits of learning ingrained by an Earthly education, he had managed—after twenty minutes of eavesdropping in the church and an evening of unconscious memorization at home—to master the local number system, which relied on the combination and variation of just over a dozen terms.

Thus, when the priest asked Wu Qingchen to count after checking Andre’s progress the following day, he had to scramble to make his recitation sound riddled with errors.

As might be expected, systematic thinking made it impossible for Wu Qingchen to fake the kind of wild, natural mistakes that Andre made; his “mistakes” followed patterns. The priest, hearing Wu Qingchen’s recitation, was immediately delighted and insisted that Wu Qingchen join Andre in counting as they cleaned, serving as both example and reminder for the struggling boy.

So, to conceal his true ability, Wu Qingchen forced himself to make a dozen mistakes each time he counted the benches. Soon, he realized that memorizing fifty numbers was easy, but remembering where to insert a dozen errors—and which ones to keep or drop as Andre improved—was real torture.

As Andre made progress, Wu Qingchen could not afford to stand still; he had to keep track of which mistakes were to be dropped and which retained. After several days of this, with the numbers and their deliberate errors constantly on his mind, Wu Qingchen nearly had a breakdown.

With no alternative, he decided to forge ahead, compressing the dozen mistakes down to just a few in the space of several days, and reluctantly enduring the priest’s astonished delight and Andre’s worshipful gaze.

Such helplessness, such necessity...

Wu Qingchen finally came to understand two old sayings: “A half-step ahead makes you a genius; a full step ahead makes you a madman.”

Too much knowledge and too many lines of thought truly are a burden.